The most important instructions from these totenpässe are those regarding Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Charon and Psyche, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope. We know most of these details from totenpässe, the so-called passports of the dead, thin gold foil pieces found in the mouths of skeletons, inscribed with details to navigate the other realm. The geography of the Greek Underworld is fascinating, and its knowledge was fundamental to Antiquity’s mystery religions. But no matter what they had seen, pilgrims couldn’t reveal it to anyone, or fearful Hades, the lord of the Underworld, would take their lives in retaliation. It was here that the dead would come to speak, as shadows fluttering over the dimly-lit stone walls. We know little about the rituals that would allow the living to contact their dead at the Necromanteion: first, they would follow a special diet that probably included hallucinogens they would then descend through underground corridors and cross three gates that replicated the ones in Hades and that took them to the dark chamber, the most secret place of all. #Hades charon seriesOdysseus visited it to contact the soul of the blind prophet Tiresias for advice on his journey, but he also suffered a series of terrifying visions involving torrents of blood, chilling screams and armies of wounded warriors. Since the river was considered a portal to Hades, its banks were the ideal location for the Necromanteion, the most important Oracle of the Dead in Ancient Greece. The Acheron, or the river of woe, is, in fact, a real river in the Epirus region of northwestern Greece, one that flows through dark gorges and goes underground in several places, which may explain its long association with liminality. The unfortunate souls who didn’t have a coin (because their bodies hadn’t received a proper burial) were condemned to wander along the banks of the Cocytus, the river of lamentation, for all eternity. Roman skull with an obol in the mouth, by Falconaumanni (own work) via Wikimedia Commons.Īlthough the messenger-god Hermes escorted the dead to the river Acheron, once they reached it they were at the mercy of Charon’s moods. But when we think of him now, we imagine a hooded, silent figure in a scene that seems taken from Arnold Böcklin’s most intriguing painting, The Isle of the Dead Charon’s role as a psychopomp, a guide for souls in the afterlife, has determined his assimilation with the image of the Grim Reaper, the personification of Death. In a fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Michaelangelo portrays him as a corpulent creature, more beastly than human. Centuries later, Dante, drawing from Virgil’s work, presents him as a surly old man who refuses to take people on his boat. The Roman poet Virgil describes him as ‘a sordid god’ with ‘uncombed, unclean’ beard, and eyes ‘like hollow furnaces on fire’ Seneca mentions his ‘sunken cheeks’. Attic funerary vases of the fifth century B.C. Inspite of his charming epithet, Charon was a fearful sight for those who found themselves alone in an unknown realm. Gustave Dore, illustrating Canto III of Dante’s Inferno, written circa 1310. His name was Charon, he of the keen gaze. It was a perilous journey, and there was only one guide to take the recently departed to their final destination. In Ancient Greece, this was the realm of Hades, separated from the land of the living by five rivers. The coins had a purpose: to allow the dead to pay for their passage to the Otherworld. It has become a part of our collective subconscious, possibly because the ritual appeared in different traditions, and it survived, although marginally, until as recently as the 20th century. The image of metal glinting over lifeless lips still makes us shiver. There was a time when the living covered the mouths of their dead with a single coin before their final goodbye.
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